


Good Management

by ion_bond



Category: Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Genre: Canon - Book, Gen, Japan, Missing Scene, POV Minor Character, Unrequited Love, WWII, works with movie canon too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-20
Updated: 2006-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 08:45:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1642223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ion_bond/pseuds/ion_bond
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A geisha reads her clients and then behaves accordingly.  Nobu Toshikazu thinks he can read Sayuri, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Good Management

**Author's Note:**

> Written for bucketmouse

 

 

Winter, 1936

Not surprisingly, the party was fairly quiet when Sayuri arrived. As the ranking executive of Iwamura Electric in the room, Nobu had been left to converse with the one German who spoke Japanese, and the ones who did not hadn't had time to get drunk yet. Nobu was very glad to see reinforcements arrive.

Sayuri knelt on the mat just inside the door, sliding the panel silently closed behind her. Nobu watched von der Emde watch her over the lip of his sake cup. He couldn't fault the man's taste. Sayuri's painted face was a glowing white oval over her dark blue kimono, shimmering in the dim room like a moon, brighter than the elaborate silver obi around her middle. Even under her still makeup, she was somehow much more vibrant than the other three geisha at the party. She made them look like dolls even as she greeted them politely one by one, working her way across the room on her knees toward Nobu and the foreigner. Her smile, as she recognized Nobu, was not reflexive -- it meant something -- and yet her beauty had a general quality that even an unimaginative man like von der Emde could recognize. Nobu made a conscious effort not to scowl as he introduced them.

"Sayuri, I'd like you to meet Ulrich von der Emde," he said. "A distinguished visitor representing the interests of the Siemens & Halske Corporation. "

"In whose honor this party is given, as I understand," Sayuri said, flicking her cloud-gray eyes up at the guest as she bowed. Nobu hated that trick of hers when it wasn't directed at him. "Well, I'm very pleased to make your acquaintance, sir."

"The pleasure is mine," said von der Emde stiffly.

"Sayuri is the protegee of the famous Mameha," Nobu said. The German looked properly dazed, but Nobu doubted that he had heard of either of the geisha. Although von der Emde had been in Kyoto for over a year now, Nobu had found that beyond the realm of engineering, he was singularly uninformed -- an uninterested and uninteresting man who still didn't seem able to distinguish Nobu's colleagues from one another by sight. "Sayuri here is one of the most sought-after geisha in Gion," Nobu explained for the benefit of his guest. "And one of the most difficult to get a hold of. Always flitting about from engagement to engagement, aren't you, Sayuri?"

"I'm sure I don't know what Nobu-san is talking about!" Sayuri said, speaking slowly in deference to the other man's foreignness, turning to him to let him in on the joke. "Nobu-san's charming manner makes it very difficult for me to leave the pleasure of his company, even when I have commitments elsewhere." She scrutinized von der Emde carefully for signs of comprehension.

"Sometimes I miss the days when one harsh word from me was enough to make you cry," Nobu returned. He watched with interest as she decided how to acknowledge the remark. Her eyes were as reflective as hematite, sizing up the other man. How well did the foreigner speak their language? Did he appreciate this kind of humor?

Devoid of clues, she settled for raising her delicate shoulders slightly. "Would von der Emde-san care for some more sake?"

"No thank you," he said, looking over at the corner where the other geisha were now leading Mr. Hashimoto and the Germans in a silent game involving broad gesticulation from the men and furious giggling from the women. "I've a feeling that I should like to keep my wits about me." He tugged at the brassard on his arm bearing the red, white and black symbol of the new German government. The other men were his superiors, Nobu knew, sent here from Berlin to check on his progress. Von der Emde couldn't afford to become as drunk as they were. "I'd prefer some pleasant conversation," he said, eyes on Sayuri's painted lips.

"Of course, sir," she said. "So would I."

Nobu was a man who knew his own limitations. He sat back against the cushions and listened to them talk, relieved that the burden of hospitality no longer rested on him. Good management is about responsibility, he told himself, but it is also about the intelligent delegation of duties. He watched her dancer's hands, as sure and expressive as two waxwings in flight, guide von der Emde from the unseasonably warm weather to traditional calligraphy to the efficacy of the Kyoto postal system. Nobu watched von der Emde laugh, blush, move his own big hands, square with blond hair on the knuckles, as he struggled to find words to offer her. Nobu listened to them talk, and drank glass after glass of sake, drank until he had to piss.

"I'm going down the hall," he said.

Sayuri rose to her feet. "Please excuse me, von der Emde-san." She ducked through the doorway with Nobu.

"How did you know I didn't want you to stay with him?" he asked her.

"I was the only apprentice geisha in the room." She smiled at him. "Seeing you to the washroom is my duty, Nobu-san."

"Don't play stupid. If I'd wanted you to stay, you would have known somehow, wouldn't you? I wouldn't have had to say anything different," he said. "You would have known. How do they teach you that?" The walls of the passageway around them seemed to breathe faintly in and out, but her trained, painted face was blank and still. For the good of Iwamura Electric, he should wish for one hundred employees like her, intuitive and obedient and full of initiative, but instead, he wanted to hit her fast and see how her expression changed. He wanted to kiss her to see if her mask fell. "Do you read the newspapers, Sayuri?"

She shook her head.

He leaned heavily against the paneling of the hallway that stretched back toward the dark rear storeroom and courtyard like an eel's bed. "I didn't think so. You are the least sophisticated of women, yet you can talk about anything with anyone," he said. "You can make anyone feel important." Nobu put out his hand to steady himself. "He's not o-yatoi gaikokujin, this German. He's not here to teach us to modernization like the foreigners who came before him. He's here to learn what we already have, and his superiors are here to buy. These contracts are very important to all of us. They all need to leave this teahouse with a good impression. "

"I understand. Men like von der Emde is to the Chairman and you what the German Ambassador who was in Kyoto last year was to the Prime Minister. I'll treat him accordingly."

"You make it seem so easy."

"It is easy."

Nobu looked at her sharply. "Every potter praises his own pot. Except for geisha -- under normal circumstances the most vain creature in existence -- whose job in this case seems to be to deny that the pot they made exists."

"How astute you are, Nobu-san." Sayuri lowered her eyes. "It is my job."

"Most men don't recognize that their play is other people's work, do they?"

"You are an unusually good judge of people," Sayuri said.

"Are you making fun of me?"

She looked up at him, eyes as clear as rainwater in a bucket, and rested one of those fluttering bird-hands on his bad shoulder for a moment -- he thought, she might touch his neck, he thought he could read worry in her face for that moment -- before tugging at the lapel of his jacket to straighten it. "Of course not," she said. "It's pleasant to be appreciated, Nobu-san."

He turned his back to her and slid open the door to the washroom. "Next time, I don't care what you think I want. Stay with the German."

Times are changing, he thought. Good management is about sending the right message.

Winter, 1948

Halfway through her first week back in Gion, the youngest of the American bankers pulled Sayuri on top of him in the middle of a crowded banquet hall and jerked her in close. Nobu was at the other side of the room with Iwamura Ken and two of their accountants when it happened, and by the time he got to his feet, another geisha and the American's friends had pulled the man away. Nobu stood there in the open space inside the large u of tables, feeling exposed and idiotic. What had he been planning to do, try to punch this occupier, this man who was twenty years younger than he?

Sayuri saw him out in the middle of the floor and flashed him a quick, false smile. Go away, said the smile, leave me alone, and one didn't have to be a geisha trained in the art of subtlety to read it. Everyone else in the room was very busy ignoring the three of them, Sayuri and the banker and President Nobu.

After the war, Gion was always a party.

Nobu left the room, struggling into his overcoat and stepping into his shoes. He went out to the courtyard behind the hotel. The wind was cold and wintry, but the shirowabisuke camellia was blooming. He looked up into the sky over the roofs of the many machiya and okiya, its midnight black expanse dingy with the lights powered by Iwamura Electric. Sayuri was waiting in the entryway. "Thank you," she said. "I appreciate it. The Chairman --"

"I'm sorry for embarrassing you," Nobu said shortly. Good management, he knew, depends upon the appropriate first reaction. "Iwamura has always been better than I at gauging threat," Nobu said.

"I'm fine," she said. "But I'm still grateful to you."

"Still, I'm sorry I brought you back here," he said. "I didn't expect this. Sato has always acted like a pig that someone foolishly let indoors, but these Americans . . ." He took a new cellophane pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his overcoat and fought with it, pinning it under his stump and trying to slide one out with clumsy fingers. "They're all animals," Nobu said, "the businessmen as much as the soldiers."

"And now it's them we have to charm. They just don't know how to behave," said Sayuri, coming over to him. He was fighting for his company's life, he was drowning, and she was walking out to him across the dirt, still in her tabi socks. She took the pack from him and handed him a cigarette.

"Thanks," Nobu said, passing her his book of matches so that she could light it for him. "But where will you get more socks?"

"These aren't ruined. Just a little dirty." She gave him the burning cigarette. "Winter will be over soon, you know."

"That's either a terribly stupid observation or a terribly blunt metaphor," Nobu said. "I expect better from a professional conversationalist such as yourself."

She shrugged her shoulders in her light gauze kimono. They were still as narrow and fragile-looking as they were when she was a fourteen-year-old girl at a sumo exhibition, laden with the heavy silk brocade of a novice geisha. There must be new muscles under the cloth, muscles for stirring vats and lifting loads in Arashino's workshop, but Nobu couldn't see the change from the outside. He should know better than to judge by appearances. Sayuri held her back straight, always the dancer. She looked perfectly poised.

"Are you all right?" he asked. "Really?"

She nodded.

"I know you can't go back to making kimono, not after wearing them. But we can arrange something else." Nobu felt like the lump of concrete he had given her was resting in his stomach; he was conscious even as he spoke of how very much he needed her, but he forced himself to continue. "If you are tired of this -- of Gion and the Deputy Minister of Finance and the American G.I.s and their noise -- I'll find you somewhere else to go. I promise." If she doesn't want me for her danna, he thought irrationally, Iwamura Electric will fail as it deserves to fail, and it will all be impossible anyway.

"I will never grow tired of Nobu-san's kindness," she said.

Nobu looked at the ground. "We are a defeated country now."

"So? Times are changing," she said. "Life changes."

He puffed on his cigarette. "I wish I were as adaptable as you seem to be."

"I've always been told that there's too much of the water element in me for balance, but at times like this, it comes in handy." She smiled -- small, but real this time. "Things are getting better in Gion again," she said. "I know you know it too, Nobu-san. You're just a man who has always chosen dumplings over flowers."

He looked at her eyes, as opaque as slate but not brittle. Hard. Her eyes were strong and beautiful. "I think perhaps I can have both," he said. He reached out to touch the soft skin of the back of her neck just under her elaborate waxed bun, hoping she wouldn't pull away.  
His heart fluttered like a fan. Good management was about taking risks.

fin.

 

 

 


End file.
